Hiya Folks!
Welcome back to the regularly irregular Money 4 Nothing Newsletter. We know it’s been a minute (honestly, quite a bit MORE than a minute) since we last hit you with our sweet sweet content. So—if you’ve signed up since we last wrote, welcome aboard! As always, we deeply appreciate your ears and eyeballs. If you like what we’re doing here, please tell a friend. It’s how we spread the good word.
AND if you have any thoughts or comments, definitely send us an email! We’re actually going to be doing a mid-year mailbag episode in the next month or two so…get us those questions while they’re hot! If we like ‘em (and given past experience, we probably will) we will do our best to talk through as many as we can possibly fit.
OK. Content:
TBH, the last couple of episodes have been something of an inadvertent tour of the fundamentals of the modern streaming economy. And while some things have changed since we last checked in (Spotify: Vertical Feed!) most others have…not (Spotify: Not Profitable!)
First up, we got to chat with Intrepid Billboard Reporter: Kristin Robinson about a truly wild story that she reported out. It has everything—weird online crime, expensive cars, uncaring digital middlemen, and the absolute chaotic mess of our contemporary rights management system. While Kristin talks us through the ins and outs of how a handful of small-time Phoenix producers ALLEGEDLY stole millions from the world’s biggest Latin music stars, we think through about how major players like Youtube have DEFINITELY constructed an intricate system of payouts that pits artists against users—and privileges their own position.
Listen to that hear (Apple), hear (Spotify), or hear (Podbean)
Next, we examined the equivalent insanity of our modern I.P. system by digging into the seemingly impossible fact that Reggaeton, the world-beating post-rap genre sensation, is (more or less) being sued by a pair of Jamaican producers (or at least their estates) for copyright infringement. And…it’s not bullshit. We talk dembow, tracing how the riddim travelled from Kingston to the World (via Panama and Puerto Rico), and what the suit tells us about the ways in which the internet has changed the game for music-making everywhere. Want more? Saxon just wrote a piece about it in the Guardian.
Listen to that hear (Apple), hear (Spotify), or hear (Podbean)
Finally, we check in on our old friend Spotify, just to see how they are doing. TLDR? Not great… Structure is structure, and the streaming economy (writ large) remains beholden to the immensely powerful leverage of the Major Labels. Which makes making money hard, you know? Speaking of which—as streaming continues to change, those companies are thinking of rewriting the rules to, you know, make things, um…more fair. For everyone. Obviously.
Listen to that hear (Apple), hear (Spotify), or hear (Podbean)
And just in case you think we only cover corporations…we had the absolute pleasure to dig into the life and career of the brilliant DJ Screw with the help of Lance Scott Walker.
Department of Actual Music:
Sam: It’s been a long winter for me, and within what’s sometimes felt like a three-month February, I’ve found this echoey slog from neolithic psych-drone explorers Moundabout incredibly…moving. How many bog bodies? How Many?
Saxon: Some post-industrial shoegaze pop discovered via the very cool early morning show with Marie Davidson on NTS. Her shows are the best morning DJ set you never had…
In Memoriam: We lost the iconoclastic engineer SPOT this past month. Bringing an improvisational pragmaticism to the recording process, he produced a string of records as wide-ranging as they were brilliant. Without his touch and humanity, SST records—and the American underground—wouldn’t have been half as unpredictable, wild, inspiring or, to a very real extent, existent. Sam got a chance to interview SPOT for RBMA a few years ago. RIP—and thank you for the music.
LUV,
Sam and Saxon